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It was meant to be just a fling

 
Avalon
Avalon
Published June 23, 2015

Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney aren't a couple, but they play one on TV — well, actually, on Amazon.

The duo created, wrote and star in Catastrophe, a romantic comedy (of sorts) now available on the streaming service. Horgan plays Sharon, an Irish teacher living in London whose weeklong fling with Rob, an American ad man in town for work, evolves into a more permanent arrangement when she winds up pregnant.

Though it's hardly an unexpected turn of events — as Sharon tells a stunned Rob, "We had sex, like, 25 times in a week and you wore a condom maybe twice" — the pregnancy and other complications, including the terrifying possibility that they might be in love, turn their lives upside down.

Their real-life partnership began in far less dramatic fashion: Horgan and Delaney met on Twitter, where he is something of a superstar (1.1 million followers and counting). As the creator of critically adored but short-lived comedies including Pulling, a raunchy, cringe-inducing cult favorite about three single women in London, Horgan had an impassioned following of her own. They eventually met and decided to collaborate on a series drawing from their own experiences as spouses (each is happily married) and parents (Delaney has three children, including a newborn; Horgan has two).

Catastrophe earned glowing notices when it premiered this year in Britain. Delaney and Horgan spoke with the Los Angeles Times about their romantic comedy.

Q: Where did the idea for the series came from?

Horgan: We just thought we should write about the stuff that we know. I got pregnant very quickly when I was with my boyfriend, who's now my husband, and we just had to decide to be together and make it work. With Rob being American and me being Irish, it felt like a nice organic root into their relationship, him sort of being on a work trip from the States and us having a fling.

Delaney: We are both very interested in our marriages and our parenting and the conflict between the two of those and career.

Horgan: It's much better when two people just decide what it is they want to write and taking the idea to someone rather than being pitched an idea or being advised this is the kind of thing that people are watching. Those don't end up being very good. Things that are true tend to be funnier.

Q: There's no shortage of television shows about relationships or parenting. Did you think something was missing from other portrayals?

Horgan: Quite often it's rose-tinted or sweet. We wanted to make a brutally honest relationship comedy and use comedy to talk about tricky things. If you can talk about tricky things and make people laugh, you're probably doing some kind of good. We liked the idea of being ambitious for a comedy — not necessarily going for comedy actors. Most of them are drama actors. I've always thought that's been a great secret to casting.

Q: What was your writing process like?

Delaney: I think about my own marriage. My wife and I have been together for 11 years. My wife is a very interesting person to me. Sometimes I would like to go to the top of the Empire State Building and either push her off or jump off with her because it's so hard being married, but it's never boring. And so we wanted to make sure even when our characters were fighting that it was always really interesting and compelling. In a lot of sitcoms you'll see the spouses get fed up with each other. Like, "Hey, she's driving me nuts," or, "He put the diaper on backwards, but at least he put it on!" That's like, kill me. That's a lie. That's why people get divorced and kill each other, because there are sitcoms like that. We wanted to make people love each other instead of kill each other.

Q: Your characters really do seem to like each other, which is refreshing.

Delaney: We wrote it and people would be like, "Jesus, this is dark." We were like, "Swear to God, it's going to be funny." And then it was broadcast and it was, "It's a love story." And even we were like, what? We knew we wanted it to be, but I thought it might not come across that way.

Horgan: I think because we were so cautious about making it too obvious, the love aspect of it. There's little things along the way that hint at it.

Q: For a comedy, Catastrophe tackles a lot of dark subjects. What motivated that?

Delaney: A show that purports to be about real life but doesn't have those things to me wouldn't be a real show. The worst stuff that happens in this show happened to us — that is the most autobiographical stuff. We really just wanted to show that that's a part of life and it's okay and there's ways to survive.

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Horgan: I wanted to make something that was saying something. We weren't sure how people were going to react, but it's nice to do something that has some substance.